The Rules Are Different

Out here in America, a country that once declined to torture people, but which has come late to the practice and now adores it so much that it gilds it with euphemism and, thereby, tortures not only the poor sap in the cell, but the English language as well, you destroy documents that the cops are looking for, and you get booked into the luxury suite of the Graybar Courtyard By Marriott. Try it. Say, the local DA wants to see the shipping documents regarding that load of arsenic that went missing near the local reservoir. Try telling him that you shredded the file because, well, it would have been bad for your business. Good luck with that. I hope you look good in orange.

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Of course, the rules for the CIA are different. The rules for the CIA always are different. If it weren't for the CIA, after all, the sudden collapse of the entire Soviet bloc wouldn't have been such a surprise.

As John Brennan moved into the CIA director's office this month, another high-level transition was taking place down the hall. A week earlier, a woman had been placed in charge of the CIA's clandestine service for the first time in the agency's history. She is a veteran officer with broad support inside the agency. But she also helped run the CIA's detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture.

No. Sorry. That's the ballgame. If you tortured people — and no, WaPo, it wasn't "treatment critics have called torture." It was treatment that Vlad The Impaler would have called torture — and then you orchestrated an illegal coverup of same, you no longer work for the United States government, much less find your anonymous criminal self up for a promotion.

(Not that the Post didn't take a little time for some beat-sweetening:The (clandestine) service is the most storied part of the CIA. It is also responsible for some of the Agency's legendary fck-ups, and it's propped up more dictators than automatic weapons have.)

Once this country committed itself to torture, the whole system of American justice went down the rabbit hole, right down to the way that system talked about itself. It corrupted everything, including the way the parts of a democracy talked to each other. Now we're actually debating whether or not the cover-up of torture is too important to be subject to the democratic safeguards that the torture itself made look so ridiculous in the eyes of the world. Jesus, what do you have to do to lose a job over this? Show up wearing a necklace of disembodied fingernails?

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